It's DONE!

I am so happy, everything is finally done, all the paper work is turned in and everything is finally in motion!!!

Our home study went great!  It ended up being super easy and not stressful at all.  The person who did our home study was a woman named Shannon.  She is our age (some where in between Ben and I), grew up in Ortonville, now lives in Grand Blanc, and has a house she said was just like ours minus our addition (the family from and 1/2 bath).

The questions she asked were exactly what I anticipated-

"How did your parents disciple you growing up?"

"Describe your relationship with your Mom"

"Have you ever been in Foster Care yourself?"

I think I was kinda nervous though because I got stumped on the first question-

"Describe your Mom."

That shouldn't have stumped me but it did for a minute.  :)  After that it all came very naturally.  Shannon mentioned that, compared to some of the other home studies she does, ours will be easy to write up because we actually answered her question directly.  She said some people answer "I don't know." to some of the questions.  I didn't know that was an option :)

Everything went pretty quickly, she looked around the house and measured the bedrooms and according to her, with Kobe still having his own room, technically we could have 3 (1 baby and 2 1-3 year olds) placed with us.

We did decide for right now to try to keep it to just one child at first because it will be a big change for us.  They may call us with siblings though and see if we want them when they are trying to place them.

We also decided to be completely open to any race which was REALLY exciting to me because Ben and I had been going back and forth but I really wanted to leave that open for God to do what he wants.  Our only concern is that the child be comfortable.  Shannon said usually the agency tries to place children in homes that are the same race as they are.

My biggest question was What happens now?

Well, Shannon has 2 weeks to write up our home study.  Just recently she has conducted 4 home studies and ours was the last.  She will not be doing any more until she writes all of those up.  After that the Home Study that she writes up goes to Lansing and is completely read and signed off on by several people.  This will take 4-8 weeks.  After that, that's it.  We will officially be "Open for Placements"  So, because I know anything that has to go through a government office can be really slow I am hoping that 8 weeks from now we will be "open".  We shall see.

It feels so good to have that done!